Ascension Gates: Rise of the Beast Monarch

Then Fallen Succubus stepped forward, and Aether looked up and saw her face.

She was pale. Paler than he had ever seen her. Her dark eyes were fixed on the sleeping creature with an intensity that bordered on dread, and her slender hands trembled where they hung at her sides.

"Aether," she said. "Listen to me carefully."

"What is it?"

"I can read the shape of a soul. You know that. It is the one thing I have always been able to do." She swallowed. "That child’s soul signature is ancient. Older than the academy. Older than any of the royal bloodlines. Older than anything in the old records I have ever read."

"What species?"

"I don’t know."

"You don’t know?"

"I have never seen anything like it." She took a shaky breath. "And there is something else. Something worse."

She knelt in front of the crystal and lifted a trembling hand toward the creature, stopping just short of touching the surface.

"Every living thing carries countless possible futures," she said softly. "A beast might become a hunter or a pet or a ruler. It might die young or live a thousand years. That’s what a soul is, in the end. A bundle of roads that haven’t been walked."

"And this one?"

"This one has only a single road." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Its soul has no future, Aether."

The words sat there like a stone.

"What do you mean?" Aether said.

"I mean it has one path left. One. And I can see where it ends." She looked up at him, and there were tears at the corners of her eyes. "It ends at the exact moment the clock reaches zero."

For a few seconds, Aether could not think. He could not even form a thought. The clock, the gate, the child. The countdown was not counting toward an awakening, or a release, or a catastrophe. It was counting toward the death of the creature in front of him.

"Then we get it out," Kael said. "Now. Before the gate opens any wider."

"Wait," Aether said.

"We can’t just leave it!"

"I’m not leaving it. I’m trying to understand what happens if we touch it." Aether stared at the crystal, at the tiny silver horns, the small, steady chest. "This has been waiting a very long time. It would be a mistake to rush."

𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

Before Kael could argue, light flared at Aether’s hip.

The silver feather blazed. The glow was brighter than before, and the voice that came out of it was closer, near enough that Aether felt it as a whisper in his ear. It was the woman’s voice, but there was something in it now that had not been there before, something raw and urgent, like a person who had been holding her breath for a very long time.

"Do not take the child."

Aether rose slowly. His hand closed around the feather. "Who are you?"

Silence.

"Who are you?" he said again, harder. "You’ve been following me for months. You know my name. You know what I carry. Why are you doing this?"

The glow flickered. For a moment he thought the connection had broken. Then the voice returned, and it was so quiet he almost missed it.

"I am someone who already watched you make this mistake once."

His blood turned cold.

He had been prepared for riddles. He had been prepared for threats, for warnings, for vague prophecy. He had not been prepared for that. The words carried no mockery and no malice, only an exhausted sorrow, as though she were speaking from the other side of a very long grief.

Once. She had watched him make this mistake once.

There was only one place that sentence could have come from. During his soul sleep he had lived through countless lives, countless versions of himself, countless roads he had never walked in the waking world. Perhaps one of those roads had ended here. Perhaps in one of them, he had reached through this crack and lifted this child out of the crystal.

And she had been there.

"Wait," he said. "Please. What happened? What did I do?"

The light guttered. The feather dimmed, and the connection thinned like smoke.

"Please," he said again. "Tell me."

But the silver glow faded into nothing, and the feather lay cold and silent in his palm.

Then the tiny creature in the crystal opened its eyes.

The silence that followed was absolute.

It was not the held-breath silence of before. This was something heavier, as if the entire Ashen Star Wilderness had been struck mute. The howling on the plain stopped mid-note. A hundred fighting beasts froze with their jaws locked and their claws buried in each other’s flesh. The wind died. The ash hung still in the air.

Even Flame Sovereign Pup, who had never in its short life stood still for anything, went rigid in Aether’s arms.

The creature’s eyes were gold.

They were the color of the single eye Aether had glimpsed beyond the gate, the same molten amber, but there was nothing terrible in them. They were soft, wide, and very young. They blinked slowly, sleepy and confused, and then they turned, unerringly, as though it already knew where to look.

They found Aether.

The tiny beast opened its mouth. Aether braced himself for a cry, for a whimper, for the shrill squeak of a newborn.

It did not roar. It did not growl.

It spoke.

"Aether."

The voice was small and clear and thin as a bell. It said his name, simply and softly, as one might greet a friend after a long separation.

Nobody moved. Liora’s weapon slipped in her fingers and nearly fell. Kael had gone ashen, his mouth hanging open. Abyss Raven croaked in dismay and took off for the sky, only to settle back down, flapping uselessly.

"How," Kael said hoarsely, "does it know your name?"

Aether could not answer. He could not have spoken if he had tried.

Something had awakened in his chest.

It began as warmth, a gentle heat blooming beneath his ribs, and spread outward in slow waves. Then the warmth sharpened into light. He felt it pushing against the fabric of his shirt, felt a mark burning itself into his skin directly over his heart, and when he pulled the collar aside and looked down, he saw it.

A faint golden mark, glowing softly against his skin.

He knew that mark. He had seen it only once before, in a place that existed outside of time, in the silence of a chamber where the first words of the world were spoken. It was the mark he had seen on the wall of the Chamber of First Words, the one that had burned itself into his memory.

Whatever this creature was, it had recognized him. And something deep inside his soul had recognized it back.

Then the gate began to close.

The great doors ground inward with a sound like grinding mountains, the single inch of darkness narrowing to a hair’s breadth. Aether turned, startled. A rush of relief rose in his chest, brief and foolish.

It lasted exactly one heartbeat.

A claw came through the crack.

It was black as the space between stars, and so vast that Aether’s mind refused to settle on its size. A single talon, curved like a scythe, thrust through the narrow opening and gripped the edge of the stone. The stone screamed. The gate, which should have been unbreakable, buckled like paper. Cracks spread across it in jagged lines, and from behind it poured a pressure so great that the earth itself broke open.

The crater floor split. Boulders flew. The slope behind them collapsed in a roaring wall of dust, and Liora threw herself against Aether, dragging him down as a slab of stone the size of a cart smashed into the ground where he had been standing.

"Kael!" he shouted.

"I see it!" Kael was already on his feet, his face grim. Abyss Raven spread its wings. Voidscale Serpent coiled, hissing. Duskwalker Beast melted out of the shadows at his side, claws extended. "All of you! Form up! Hold the line!"

Liora planted herself in front of Aether, her weapon raised, her knuckles white around the grip. Flame Sovereign Pup leaped down from his arms and snarled at the sky. Spirit Fairy spread her wings in a protective ring around the crystal chamber.

And Aether stepped forward.

He did not decide to. His legs moved on their own, pulled by the same strange gravity that had drawn him to the gate. The golden mark on his chest burned brighter with every step. He raised one hand, not toward the claw, not toward the stone, but toward the tiny creature in the crystal, as if he could reach it across all the dust and chaos.

The giant claw flexed. It was reaching for the chamber.

"Don’t touch it!" Kael shouted.

But the claw did not strike. Before it could close, the tiny creature in the crystal threw back its head and screamed.

It was a terrible, piercing, heartbroken sound. It cut through the roar of collapsing stone like a blade through silk. It was not a roar, not a cry of pain, not a call to battle. It was the sound a child makes when it has been left alone in the dark for too long and has finally been found.

The claw stopped.

It froze in the air, inches from the crystal, trembling. The pressure that had been crushing the crater slackened. For the first time since the gate had opened, the vast and terrible presence behind it hesitated.

Aether stood motionless, his hand still outstretched, and in the sudden silence he heard the woman’s voice one last time. It came from the feather in his fist, so faint and so sad that it was almost a sigh.

"Now you understand."

He shook his head. "I don’t. Not yet."

"The beast isn’t sealed inside the gate."

Aether’s eyes narrowed. Every nerve in his body had gone still. "What?"

The voice grew very quiet. It spoke each word slowly, deliberately, as though laying stones one at a time across a river.

"The gate is sealed because of the beast."

Aether turned that over in his mind once, then twice, and felt the ground shift beneath him. He had been looking at the problem backward. The gate was not a prison built to hold a monster. It was a lock built to protect the world from something, or to protect something from the world. And the child in the crystal, the small, frightened, fragile child, was not the prisoner.

It was the reason.

The crystal chamber cracked.

A hairline fracture ran across its pale wall, then another, then a spiderweb of them. Golden light spilled out of the splits, soft and warm and steadily growing. The tiny beast curled tighter, its small body glowing like a lantern, and the mark on its forehead began to turn. Slowly, one broken line at a time.

Beyond the gate, the enormous being spoke.

Its voice rolled across the crater, deep as the roots of the world. It did not rage. It did not threaten. It spoke with the quiet, absolute certainty of something that had waited ten thousand years to say a single sentence.

"Return what belongs to me."

Aether looked at the newborn beast, small and glowing and trembling in its shell of crystal.

Then he looked at the gate, and the vast shadow looming behind it.

He understood, finally, that he had been asking the wrong question since the moment he first set foot in this place. It no longer mattered what was behind the gate. It no longer mattered what the countdown meant, or who the woman was, or even what the First Beast was.

There was only one question left, and it was the one that terrified him most.

Why did the First Beast believe this child belonged to it?